Sometimes these people are good friends, co-workers, and even family members. Outside of Twitter they’re great, but on Twitter they just can’t seem to stop posting cat memes and flooding your feed with hundreds of useless updates that nobody cares about.

Here’s the good news: you can mute them.

To illustrate, I’m going to mute my writing colleague, Mihir Patkar. He’s obviously gone off the deep end by criticizing my favorite Indian food and we don’t need that kind of negativity in our lives.

To mute someone, click the ellipsis (…) under one of their status updates and select Mute. When muting someone, you keep your Twitter connection but you won’t see anything they Tweet unless you go to their profile. This is different from blocking, which completely removes them as a connection.

Another useful feature is "Turn off retweets". Many of the annoying things m friends post are retweets. I like to hear what friends say but don't want to see the cat video they saw on someone else's feed. So don't mute, turn off retweets.